{
  "id": "ordenanzas-para-el-tratamiento-de-los-indios-1513",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "The first royal ordinances for the treatment of the Indians (1513)",
  "summary": "The first body of royal law written specifically about how the indigenous people of the Americas were to be housed, fed, taught, worked and rested — thirty-two chapters despatched after the Dominican protest on Hispaniola. Read from the crown's own chronicle, the code turns out to contain both a forty-day rest and an order to burn the houses people were being moved out of, and to be followed at once by large repartimientos to the King's own courtiers.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "americas",
    "hispaniola",
    "colonial-law",
    "colonial-institutions",
    "indigenous-peoples",
    "labour",
    "sixteenth-century",
    "spanish-empire"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "montesinos-sermon-1511"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "encomienda"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "new-laws-of-1542"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "recopilacion-de-leyes-de-indias"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "protector-de-indios"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "noticias-secretas-de-america"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "torquemada-monarquia-indiana-1723"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "ordenanzas-de-cortes-1524"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "tamemes-y-el-cargar-de-los-indios"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "segunda-audiencia-de-nueva-espana"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "santo-domingo-primera-ciudad-de-las-indias"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "bulas-de-paulo-iii-de-1537"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "What were the first Spanish laws for the treatment of the Indians?",
    "What did the Laws of Burgos actually require?",
    "Did Spanish law regulate indigenous labour before 1542?",
    "Who received Indians in repartimiento after the 1513 ordinances?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The earliest printed narrative places the code in 1513 and counts thirty-two chapters. Herrera gives it in Decada I, libro IX, capitulo XIV, headed \"De otra instancia de los frayles Dominicos, sobre el particular de los Indios, y lo que resultó\", under the marginal year 1513, and writes that after many juntas they despatched \"ciertas ordenanças en Valladolid, que contenían treynta y dos capitulos, concernientes al tratamiento de los Indios, y en especial a la dotrina Christiana\". The same body of law is conventionally called the Leyes de Burgos, dated 27 December 1512 and counted at thirty-five ordinances; no text of the ordinances was reachable to settle the difference, so this object reports what its source prints and leaves the discrepancy standing rather than resolving it from memory.",
      "sources": [
        "herrera-decadas-t1-1728"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.7
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "The central instrument was resettlement, and the ordinance for it is brutal and sentimental in the same sentence. Those who held Indians in encomienda were to build them houses — the bohios — near the estancias and provide them with food; and once the new houses were built, the houses the Indians had in their own settlements were to be burned, \"para que perdiessen el cariño de bolver a ellas\", with the express instruction that in this move no violence be used with them \"sino de mucha dulçura\".",
      "sources": [
        "herrera-decadas-t1-1728"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "The junta's stated reason for moving people was the cost of itinerant instruction: it seemed to them that leaving the Indians in their own estancias meant having to teach them from the beginning each time, and that continual conversation with the Castilians was the means by which they would be inclined to religion. The ordinances then required churches to be built and provided with images and ornaments, fixed the form in which the doctrine was to be taught and confession made, and obliged whoever held fifty Indians in encomienda to have one of them taught to read and write.",
      "sources": [
        "herrera-decadas-t1-1728"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "Schooling of the indigenous elite was written into the code and paid for by the crown. Encomenderos were obliged to have children baptised within eight days of birth; the sons of the caciques aged thirteen and under were to be handed to the friars of San Francisco for four years, to be taught to read and write and then returned; and to teach Latin grammar to the sons of caciques the King ordered the salary of the Bachiller Hernán Xuárez paid from the Real Hacienda.",
      "sources": [
        "herrera-decadas-t1-1728"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "The labour clauses are specific enough to be tested against practice. Penalties were set on those who used Indians as carriers, the pack animals having by then been brought from Castile. Those employed at gathering gold were to work five months of the year and then rest forty days, the whole workforce leaving the diggings on one and the same day and going home; during those forty days no free Indian was to be taken to gather gold. Order was given on the quantity and kind of food to be provided and on beds and clothing. No one was to strike, whip or imprison an Indian: a man who deserved punishment was to be taken to the Visitador. Pregnant women were not to be given work in any manner. Encomenderos were to render account to the Visitadores of the Indians born and dead in the four repartimientos, and the Visitadores were to make their visit twice a year rather than once.",
      "sources": [
        "herrera-decadas-t1-1728"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "The crown defended the repartimiento in the same breath as it regulated it. The King's answer to the Dominicans was that when he ordered the Indians distributed he had joined to himself the counsel of many men of letters, theologians and jurists, that the apostolic grant and donation had been weighed in the presence of the Archbishop of Seville, that it conformed to divine and human right, and that if in conscience there were error the fault would not be his but of those who advised him.",
      "sources": [
        "herrera-decadas-t1-1728"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "What happened immediately after the resolution is the strongest evidence against reading the ordinances as a reform. Herrera writes that once it was taken, the King's privados asked for repartimientos and got them: the Bishop of Palencia eight hundred Indians across the four islands of Hispaniola, San Juan, Cuba and Jamaica; the Comendador Lope de Conchillos one thousand one hundred; the secretary Hernando de Vega two hundred; the camarero Juan Cabrero, the Licenciado Mosica and many others of various ranks more or fewer; and they sent their mayordomos out to administer them.",
      "sources": [
        "herrera-decadas-t1-1728"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "The same juncture produced a separate experiment. Fray Pedro de Cordova asked leave to pass to Tierra Firme and preach to Indians who had not yet met Castilians; the King ordered the Bishop of Palencia to give him the licence and favour, the despatches were issued, a ship was granted, and provision was made for the things of divine worship — wine and flour for the altar, ornaments, bells — with the friars of Santo Domingo on Hispaniola sailing to settle at the nearest part of the mainland.",
      "sources": [
        "herrera-decadas-t1-1728"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c9",
      "text": "This object stands on a chronicler, not on the ordinances. Herrera wrote as royal chronicler roughly ninety years after the event, and the copy read is the Antwerp 1728 reprint; every clause reported here is his summary of the code, not a transcription of it. A text of the ordinances themselves would be the right anchor for this subject and none was reachable from this container.",
      "sources": [
        "herrera-decadas-t1-1728"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "secondary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "The Laws of Burgos are named in almost every survey of the Spanish Americas and quoted in almost none; what circulates is a count of ordinances and the adjective \"first\". This object gives the clauses — five months of gold work and forty days of rest taken on the same day by everyone, no beating without the Visitador, no work for pregnant women, births and deaths reported, a schoolmaster paid by the treasury for caciques' sons — set beside the two things the summaries leave out: the order to burn the houses people were being moved from, gently, and the eight hundred Indians the bishop who chaired the business took for himself once it was settled.",
  "confidence": 0.8,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-09",
  "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/ordenanzas-para-el-tratamiento-de-los-indios-1513",
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  "jsonld": {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "name": "The first royal ordinances for the treatment of the Indians (1513)",
    "description": "The first body of royal law written specifically about how the indigenous people of the Americas were to be housed, fed, taught, worked and rested — thirty-two chapters despatched after the Dominican protest on Hispaniola. Read from the crown's own chronicle, the code turns out to contain both a forty-day rest and an order to burn the houses people were being moved out of, and to be followed at once by large repartimientos to the King's own courtiers.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/ordenanzas-para-el-tratamiento-de-los-indios-1513",
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    "dateModified": "2026-08-09",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Historia general de las Indias Ocidentales, ò de los hechos de los Castellanos en las Islas y Tierra firme del Mar Oceano — Tomo Primero, que contiene las Decadas Primera y Segunda",
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    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "The first royal ordinances for the treatment of the Indians (1513)"
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